@sketch3d_de raises a good point. Trimble is a commercial company that seeks to make a profit. They are not in the free software/open source paradigm of Linux. So, they need to be convinced that there is enough of a market for paid licenses to Pro (vs for free Make) to justify spending the (likely not trivial) effort to create a Linux port. You might try a survey of likely Pro users to see how many of them would prefer Linux.

I think the best is to elect a few strong players to target the software for. Now, we have RPM and DEB main package formats. In the RPM world, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Suse are big players. Likewise, in the DEB world, Debian and Ubuntu. Slackware is another big player with its .tar.gz format. Several professional third party software (like Quartus, MPLABX etc) have a shell-based installer (in order to be package-format-independent), include some self-built libraries (to solve distro differences) and comply to LSB standard. I think this can be a good path for developing a native Linux version of Sketchup.

I have never seen an application with GTK interface that I liked. (Hated in fact.) But then I’ve always seen them run under Windows.

I love the look of QT (ref LibreCAD & QCAD),… but it seems incredibly expensive for commercial projects, ie $350.00/month/developer. (Sure it is free for open source projects, but SketchUp is not one.)

Agreed that QT defaults looks sleek and that its probably not a wise choice for commercial projects unless you are already familiar with it and therefore can save a lot of coding time while reaping the multiplatform advantage.

But GTK+ can just as well be skinned with themes to look like anything you want it to, even on Windows.

Default theme since mid-2014 is named Adwaita and doesn’t look that bad IMHO.

What you might be referring to is the pre-2014, downright ugly default named Raleigh which was created by Red Hat and carbon-14 dated back to the precambrian era…

All in all, UX Design is both an art and a science. Any toolkit can yield the best as well as the worst, given the right/wrong hands…!

+1 for Linux, preferably something work-able with the Debian branch of things, in my case, I live on Ubuntu.

It’d be sweet if they could make a pure javascript rendition and it just runs out of the browser. That being said, I also go offline for long stretches, so if the javascript engine could be downloaded, that’d be ideal.

I presently run Make in Virtual Box and win 7-1 … Under Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit on my laptop
If I had the money for buying this program I would . . I am presently trying to get something going so I can use / buy the Pro version. . haha get the buy window every time I start Make 2016 version . . So one day I will push the buy button as it is on my Bucket list of things to get done . . ( being way past 70 makes it a short list of things )
And .deb version would fit very well in Ubuntu . . As Blender has a VERY long Learning Curve . .

You have it running from a flash drive ? WOW and under Wine . . I went to using Virtual Box and Win 7-1 for running it . . Gives me a lot more control as to what resources it can use . . I limit it to 2 of the CPU’s and only 1.5 gig of ram and since it is on a laptop 120 megs of video for windows to use and 136 megs left for Ubuntu . . not screaming fast but I get there and have opened some files which they ( the ones running this group said I could never open )

Ubuntu or Cent OS
I have seen people managing to install older versions of Sketchup on Linux in Wine environment, this did not work for me.
Would it be possible or maybe easier to develop Sketchup for Linux in such way so it would work well in Wine? This way the developers would not have to worry about rebuilding the whole application for a different operating system. Let Wine take care of it.

+1 for the Linux version. I am an architect and have switched all my machines to Linux (Fedora). I have a Windows 7 license running in a virtual machine and the ONLY reason I’m doing that is for SketchUp. I’m running Make right now but if there was a native version offered I would gladly pay for the Pro license.

As for the Linux market share, it may be small right now but it is growing. Netmarketshare shows an increase from 1.63% to 2.33% over the last year. It might not look like much, but Apple had a 4% share back in 2006, when SketchUp for Mac was announced (they’re at just under 8% now).